Azerbaijan's data centre plans: what officials have said and what documents show

Azerbaijan has presented its surplus electricity, fibre network and position between Europe and Asia as the basis for a data centre and AI computing industry, but the projects documented so far are state-led. The most recent official statement, on 25 September, said talks on a data centre in the Alat free economic zone were in their final stage. No capacity, investor, price or date has been published.

What officials have said

Rashad Hasanov, Deputy Minister of Digital Development and Transport, told the second Azerbaijan International Investment Forum in Baku that high-performance computing needs reliable energy, connectivity and physical space, and that the country has all three, Trend reported. He cited surplus generation of about 2 GW and an extensive fibre-optic network, and said the Alat data centre was in the final stage of negotiation after long discussions with numerous hyperscale data centre and cloud companies. He described the intended value chain as turning energy into computing power, then into AI and digital services and high-value exports. Report.az carried the same remarks and noted that no counterparty was named and that it was not stated whether a deal had been signed. Hasanov also said the migration of government information systems to the state cloud, G-Cloud, is continuing and is due to finish by the end of 2027, a step he described as important for the resilience of those systems.

The 2 GW figure echoes an earlier statement. At a meeting on the digital action plan on 11 February, President Ilham Aliyev said Azerbaijan has at least 2,000 MW of unused generation capacity out of a total of 10,000 MW, which he called a prerequisite for digitalisation, artificial intelligence and data centres. By Corridor Signal's arithmetic that is about 20 per cent of installed capacity. He also said transport and energy corridors should become fibre-optic corridors, and linked the energy demand of data centres to planned green energy cables. The record of that meeting gives no data centre capacity, project list or investment figure.

What documents show

The one project with published financing is state-owned. In December 2024 the European Investment Bank said its lending arm, EIB Global, had signed a EUR 43 million loan to AzInTelecom, its first loan to Azerbaijan's public sector. The money is for digital infrastructure for government services, including two new data centres in the Absheron and Hajigabul regions to provide cloud services, with completion planned for 2027. The release says AzInTelecom's existing data centres are in Baku and Yevlakh, that the operator was the first in the South Caucasus to receive Tier 3 certification, and that the new sites will use green technologies. It does not give their capacity in megawatts.

Interconnection data is thin. The Internet Society's Pulse tracker says no active exchange point is listed for Azerbaijan, and PeeringDB's public API, queried on 17 October, listed seven facilities, all in Baku. Both rely on voluntary records, and absence from them does not prove that an exchange does not operate.

What is not known

• the capacity, owner and operator of the Alat data centre, and whether any hyperscaler has committed;
• whether the roughly 2 GW of surplus generation can be delivered to a specific site, which depends on grid connections the statements do not describe;
• how the public sites in Absheron and Hajigabul relate to the Alat project, if at all;
• whether the action plan the president requested in February has been published with data centre targets.

Until a counterparty or capacity is disclosed, the Azerbaijani case rests on stated advantages rather than a contracted project. The first test is whether the Alat negotiations produce an announcement naming an investor and a megawatt figure.